


Coming Back Together (Just to Fall Apart)

by StardustDreamsandAnarchy



Category: DC Extended Universe, Doom Patrol (TV)
Genre: Adults acting like adults, Dysfunctional Family, Found Family, Gen, Lots of Cursing, Responsibility, Team as Family, Therapy, niles caulder is the worst, take some fucking responsibilty, therapy! therapy!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:00:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26950303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StardustDreamsandAnarchy/pseuds/StardustDreamsandAnarchy
Summary: The Doom Patrol begins to reckon with their actions and rethink certain relationships
Kudos: 8





	1. Cognition

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this idea bouncing around my head for a while and didn't seem to have the time to write it, but lo and behold- I suddenly have time to write instead of doing school work. Won't he do it!  
> Seriously though, I hope y'all like it

“What the fuck are we doing?” Cliff sat up a bit in his chair and turned to look at the others. 

“Uh…. We’re doing a briefing on our latest mission?” Victor shot a glance at Jane, who shrugged back at him.

“No, I mean what the fuck are we doing with our lives?”

“What _do_ you mean, Cliff?” asked Rita, exasperated. 

Cliff yelled and stood up, causing his chair to fall behind him. “ What the fuck are we doing?! We’ve just been sitting here, going on fucking missions and doing hero bullshit and we’ve been fucking up every single time over here!”

“Whoa! Whoa! Cliff… you’ve gotta calm down man. Tell us what you mean.” The Negative Spirit glowed in Larry, as if to say _Use your words, Cliff._ but Cliff just yelled again. 

”We’ve all been so caught up in our own bullshit that we haven’t been doing what we need to do, we haven’t been stepping up and I’m fucking tired of being such a screw-up! We’re supposed to be the fucking adults here.”

Cliff began to pace around the room, the sound of his footsteps clanking off the marble floors. This had been a thought bouncing around his brain for a while now. Always just out of reach and he’d finally managed to grasp it, but making it come out was a struggle. He’d never been good at expressing himself, but since he’d been put into this body, it seemed like everything took longer. Thinking, speaking, feeling different things. Anger came easiest still. That white-hot rage that used to course through his veins, speeding through him faster than his car at the track, he could always make that come quick. 

“You! And me! Us! All of us have been dealing with the fucking Chief and our lives and our fucking powers or whatever. Jane’s been spending more and more time in the Underground! None of us have been here, none of us have even tried to be there for Dorothy!”

“What?! This is about the kid?”

“Yes it’s about the fucking kid! It should’ve always been about the kid! I thought I was a shitty father, but then the Chief came and blew me out of the water with locking his kid on a traveling street for a century! Then we brought her here and what have we fucking done for her?”

Everyone looked away from Cliff’s searching eyes and he punched the air triumphantly.

”Exactly! Jack! Shit! I actively rejected her. Baby Doll was friendly with her, but they had their issues and now the one person even close to her age is gone. I don’t know what the fuck happened between her and Rita, but that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and Vic and Larry…. What happened to you two?”

“I was in Detroit. I had my own things to deal with.”

“I made her pancakes.” Larry offered lamely.

“ _Ohhhh_. You made her _pancakes_ , did you Larry. How long ago was that?” He shot back. The anger felt good, it made him feel powerful, but he knew he had to dig deeper, to the thing that never came easy. The thing the anger was always just obscuring. 

He sighed as he tried to let himself be vulnerable (which was especially hard when your body is made out of titanium and steel). “I know things have gone to shit, every fucking thing fell apart, but at some point, we were a team! A family. Dorothy is a kid, and we should have made a better effort to make her comfortable, happy! We should’ve given her everything we had, but we didn’t.”

Cliff looked around at the group for support, a response, anything. But none seemed to be forthcoming.

“Come on! We have to make a plan, we have to do something-“

“You’re right.”

“What was that?” Cliff blinked. He wasn't used to people agreeing with him, least of all Rita. He looked over at her, to see she was staring into the fireplace with a far away look in her eyes. She looked haunted, like she saw something in the fire that she didn’t want to see.

“You’re right, Cliff. _God_ ” She stood up and walked to the stand near the fire and as she passed, Cliff could see the start of tears in her eyes. “I- I just remembered. The night of Danny’s party, I said something horrible to her. I was drunk and sad, but that’s no excuse. What is wrong with me? With all of us?! Living in this house was supposed to be a way for us to change- to improve, but we’ve just become…. Stuck.”

“So how do we move on?” Larry’s chest glowed again as his question hung heavy in the air.


	2. Tea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doom Patrol has decided to start making some changes around the Manor, starting with a surprise for Dorothy!

“Hey Dorothy… We have a surprise for you!”

She squealed with delight and jumped off her bed where she’d been reading a comic book with Darling. Darling spun her mirrored face around to look at Cliff as Dorothy ran up to him. 

“What’s the surprise?”

“I can’t tell you that, it’s a surprise for a reason.”

Suddenly, a fuzzy, many eyed face sprung from the floor beneath Cliff’s feet. “It’s a tea party.”

“God-damnit, Herschel!” Cliff moved to stomp him, but the tarantula was gone as quickly as he’d come. “Yeah, fine. Whatever. It’s a tea party. NO SPIDERS ALLOWED, though.” 

”I’m more a coffee person anyways.” Herschel’s raspy voice came from the hallway and Cliff shuddered as he imagined the hulking spider standing right behind him. 

Dorothy ran up and grabbed Cliff’s hand before he could stop her. “That’s okay, Herschel and Darling were just going away! Where’s the tea party?”

“Out in the garden, c’mon.” Cliff tried to gently shake the girl loose from his hand, but she’d latched on tight, so he resigned himself to being attached to her, at least until they got to the party. 

They started down hallway towards the staircase and Dorothy stopped walking.

”What’s up, kid?”

“The others are setting up the tea party right now?” 

”Yup, right now… out in the garden… Let’s go.”

”Cliff… Why do you hate my father?

Never before had he been more grateful for his immobile face. Cliff was sure that if he still had skin, he’d have let out a horrible grimace. 

”I don’t hate Niles…”

”Yes, you do.”

Dorothy was always so _persistent_. It was time to bring out the big guns, tactics he used to use when his wife was accusing him of something or another- turn the accusations back on them.

“What makes you think I hate the Chief?”

Dorothy moved to sit at the top of the stairs, so Cliff joined her. The others were probably tapping their feet right now, looking at their watches, wondering where he and Dorothy were. He’d just tell them he rusted again.

”It seems like no one likes Papa. Everyone is always trying to hurt him, and you’re always yelling at him.”

”Well, I yell at everyone.”

”You yell at him the most and…” Dorothy stopped and took in a shuddering breath. Her hands were gripping her skirt so tightly, her knuckles were turning white.

”What?”

”When I used to play with Babydoll, she said that Papa was a bad man. It made me upset and that’s why I made that wish. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but I think she might’ve been right.”

Cliff sighed deeply. He wasn’t sure where to even begin with this. The team had all agreed that they’d begin being more open with Dorothy and more involved, but they hadn’t agreed on what all to tell her about Niles yet. The tea party was as much for him as it was her, they were gonna tell them both, promise to be more committed to the team, to be a family.

”How ‘bout this…. If you’re playing hide and go seek with someone and they cheat, that’s not good right?”

”Right…”

”But, just ‘cause they cheat at Hide and Seek, that doesn’t mean they’re a horrible person. Maybe a little bad, but not terrible… It’s kinda like that with the Chief. He’s done some things that aren’t _great_ but, I really do think he always tried his best and I know for a fact, that he loves you a lot Dorothy. Everything he’s done, he’s always done it so he can be there and take care of you and he’s tried his best.”

”So, he’s hurt people?”

”Kid… What you gotta understand is, everyone hurts others. Sometimes, it’s by accident, others not so much, like when you fought with Babydoll, she hurt you and you hurt her back, right?” 

She nodded.

“Why?”

Her voice was barely a whisper. “It felt good at first.”

”Yeah, hurting others can feel good at first, because you get to make them feel what you felt, but the thing is, it doesn’t ever feel good for long. Right after you hurt Babydoll, you felt super bad again, right? Well everyone has hurt someone else in some way, usually by accident or because they were also hurting, which doesn’t make it right. When you’re an adult, you should know better, but the truth is… adults are just in bigger bodies and have more experience with hurting others, so we sometimes get better at it without learning how not to do it. And just like with Babydoll, just because you feel bad about hurting other people, it doesn’t mean you can change what you did, right?”

“So, Papa has hurt people and can’t change what he did… That’s why you all are mad at him?”

”Yeah, but… just because he hurt us, doesn’t mean we aren’t still his friends and doesn’t mean he can’t change and do better in the future. That’s sort of what this tea party is about… because we’ve hurt you too, Dorothy. And we want to apologize and talk about how we can do better for the future.”

“Oh.” Dorothy seemed surprised at this turn of events. Cliff thought back to his childhood, trying to remember if his parents had ever apologized to him, tried to think back to if he’d ever apologized to Clara. 

“So, c’mon. Let’s go drink some fucking tea.”


End file.
